‘The Rhythms Within’ group exhibit opens at Haley Art Gallery

The final exhibit of Haley Art Gallery’s 2022 season, “The Rhythms Within,” runs Sept. 17 through Nov. 19 and features the “Murmurs of the Mirror” series by Carlos Vega, paintings by Tom Glover and metal sculptures and framed metal art by Chris Newcomb.  

The opening reception will be held from 3 to 6 p.m. Sept. 17.

Tom Glover studied with John Laurent for over two decades, after meeting Laurent at the University of New Hampshire. Glover’s work often involves thematic concerns and investigation from his world travels. Currently teaching at Sanctuary Arts in Eliot, he has taught at the UNH, lectured at the University of Connecticut in the Fulbright Program to foreign educators and Science Education graduate students and has been a panelist/lecturer on his own work, John Laurent’s, and the Ogunquit School of Art. His recent work focuses on birds, Fenway Park, Deer Isle and abstract combinatory paintings, which he describes as “concentrations of the piers, docks, flotsam and jetsam one finds along the coast of Maine and New Hampshire.”

Chris Newcomb is an artist, author, actor, storyteller and avid gardener who integrates his metal art by creating unique spaces with plants, metal and steel sculptural elements and whimsical figures that turn ordinary spaces into “otherworld” spaces “to enjoy, to contemplate in, to simply sit and be.” He holds a BFA from East Carolina University and has worked on hand-built clay sculptures and vessels, paintings, found-object sculpture, cartooning and has taught creative movie making at the Maine College of Art. In translating his primitive print images into steel, he says using a plasma cutter “seems like the most natural extension” of his hands and of any tool he’s ever used.

Carlos Vega, a Chicano artist who lives between New England and the South of Spain, was raised on the border between Mexico and the U.S. and studied in Paris, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work captures the hybridity of culture and spirit that is ever-changing in the Latinx community, one shaped and reshaped by places left behind and those to be found. Religion and spiritual belief — in all its manifestations and transgressions — are central to his work considering religion as much image, ritual and the material, as an abstract belief. Vega works primarily with antique and vintage mirrors in historic frames that may tell their own stories. He further erodes the reflective surface of the mirrors to bring out what he believes the glass has retained of what it has seen. Some will imagine a collage, but he believes he is revealing portions of cultural and personal pasts. Other than existing images, he employs gold and other metal foil, paint, ink (oftentimes using a syringe that breaks through the layers of impressions) and powdered pigment. When not creating art, he teaches Medieval Spanish Literature at Wellesley College.

Haley Art Gallery is at 178 Haley Road, Kittery. Visit the gallery and its gift shop, with social impact gift items from around the world, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. Contact Haley Art Gallery at 617-584-2580 or [email protected] for more information, or go to haleyartgallery.com.